faint eternal recurrent whispering hug in silence reassuring lullaby alone authoritative voice under a lonely streetlamp
increasingly confirming warmth glowing within evermore fingers pointing towards one home
if only we open ears to hear, open eyes to see, open heart to receive …
“Our English word ‘mystery’ comes from a Greek verb with the root meaning of ‘shutting’ – closing your eyes or shutting up. (The word ‘mute’ comes from the same linguistic root.) Mystery commands silence, since it is precisely that which cannot possibly comprehend mystery intellectually, cannot grasp it by means of logical terms, and yetwe can understand it. The distinction between comprehension and understanding is a most important one. We may not have reflected on the difference between these two forms of coming to know something, but we are familiar with it – from our experience with music. No intellectual analysis can ever hope to grasp music in its essence. Yetwe can deeply understand music, in moments when we are being moved by it. This understanding implies more than mere emotions. It is an insight deeper even than intellectual comprehension. T.S. Eliot has such moments in mind when he speaks in The Four Quartets of ‘music heard so deeply / that it is not heard at all, but you are the music / while the music lasts.’ Our ‘being moved’ implies that music must ‘do something’ to usbefore we can understand it.
Thus, mystery is not a vague and mystifying term. We can clearly spell out what we mean by it. Mystery is a power that we can never comprehendbut canunderstandthrough its impact on us. ‘What we can grasp gives us knowledge, but that which ‘grabs us’ gives us wisdom,’ says the great medieval mystic Bernard of Clairvaux.
A mystic, as the word suggests, is someone who lives in touch withMystery. In this respect, all of us aremystics. In our Peak Experiences, we become aware of that fact, but whether we are aware of this or not, we are at all times immersed in Mystery. Mystery is the power that empowers nature. It is in us and all around us, present and active in all there is.
When I ask myself, ‘Who am I?’ it does not take long for me to reach a point where I no longer comprehend myself, but I do understand who I am: I am rooted in Mystery. I find this to be true also of everything around me: when I inquire into anything deeply and long enough, my quest leads into Mystery.”
Steindl-Rast. “You Are Here. Keywords for Life Explorers.” Orbis, 2023.
Spiritual intelligence - the ability to recognize & connect with the deeper dimensions of human experiences, such as meaning, purpose, & transcendence. It involves skills such as self-awareness, reflection, and a sense of connection to something greater than oneself : http://www.johnlovas.com/2019/11/what-is-this-who-am-i.html
“The loss of a relationship is not the same as the loss of a life. Suffering a sudden betrayal is not the same as dying from heart failure. Yet both can teach us how to cultivate a new relationshiptosurrenderandacceptance.” Sunita Puri MD
“Jesus cried out in a loud voice, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? ' ”
Betrayal by the Divine, Nature, Source, God, the Force, Ultimate Reality; by a human being we love dearly; or even by a pet that 'suddenly turns on us,' is perhaps the ultimate shock to the system. Even the death of a loved one is a kind of betrayal. Even dropping & breaking something we've worked so hard to make for someone else is a kind of betrayal. We assume that if we're doing good, surely then the Force is with us. Nope, not necessarily. Nature is constantly reminding uswho we already ARE - to BE who we are, have always been & will be, and not to be so busy trying to do more, trying to become someone else, to go somewhere else. We resist hard truths. To the extent we attempt to resist reality, we suffer needlessly. We demandnot 'a spoonful of sugar' to make the medicine go down, butgallons of syrup. In the 1992 movie "A Few Good Men" Jack Nicholson's character famously yells, 'You can't handle the truth!'
In the 2016 movie, "The Dreamseller" (Netflix) the main character, once a workaholic billionaire who prioritized his business over his wife & young daughter, sees his wife & daughter perish when his private jet explodes. At the same time, he loses his business empire when his best friend & colleague betrays him. These events completely transform him - which many see as 'madness.' He now understands that true success is attaining what money can't buy.
Spiritual maturation or evolution or 'pulling up our big boy pants' involves a new relationship with reality. Aging involves losing EVERYTHING we've worked so hard all our lives to learn, master, accumulate, depend upon etc. NOW we must learn to accept loss after loss, after loss, till we have no thing left to lose - the materialevaporates -ONLY THEN the Mystery!
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. Reinhold Niebuhr - later adopted & popularized by Alcoholics Anonymous & other 12-step programs
The Serenity Prayer (above) is fairly well-known, and takes asimple black-and-white approach, dividing life into controllable vs uncontrollable aspects. We love simplicity so much that we make simple models of even the most complex experiences, then pretend that our simple models are the real deal. Below are deeper, more nuanced understandings of life's complexities.
The process of maturation or evolution seems to involve a step-wise release / healing of addictions, phobias, traumas, dogmas / exclusivisms, neuroses / hangups, magical thinking, must-haves / must-avoids, prejudices, spiritual bypassing, etc. The most dramatic way we can evolve is from severe trauma that causes collapse of our world as we know it, including our model of it: our self-concept / worldview, forcing some of us to build progressively more inclusive self-concepts / worldviews. Such shifts tend to be from exclusive self-concern (egocentric), towards a balanced concern that increasingly includes others & the environment (allocentric & ecocentric), even according to secular models of wisdom - eg: http://www.robertjsternberg.com/wisdom
In the quote below, "Spirit" is used to point to "something greater" than the individual self - a transpersonal consciousness, Universal Intelligence, "Self", Quantum Field, etc (this includes Christian mysticism but little to do with dogmatic proprietary religious exclusivism). “When an addict ‘bottoms out,’ what this really
means is that his or her personal willhasbroken down. And when our
personal will has broken down, a whole different force comes rushing
into our system. It’s the force of Spirit, and it can now become
operational, because we are no longer avoiding it through grasping at
personal will.” Adyashanti.“The End of Your World. Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment.” Sounds True, 2010.
“The Serenity Prayer rotates around a kind of social convention – the idea that virtually everything answers to the following description: can you control it, or can’t you? That’s the whole axis around which that prayer rotates. Can you control it, or can’t you? So my simple question is, ‘When did human life – the inner life, the intra-psychic life, the interpersonal life – when did it become a matter of the irreducible constant by which you calculate every move, every decision, every relationship, every self-understanding? How did it come down to, ‘Can I control it, or can’t I?’ Because surely you can hear in there the addiction to control as the principle understanding of why everything happens the way it does, or why it doesn’t. Why you feel this way, or why you don’t. So what is grief? It’s an antidote to the Serenity Prayer – not methadone, antidote. It doesn’t replace the Serenity Prayer’s function. It doesn’t replace an old understanding of control with a new understanding of control. What grief does, is essentially let you in for this: the world is bigger than you. The ways of the world are bigger than your decisions & belief systems about it. And your proper posture in the face of the world is humility, not control. It’s taking a knee, not taking more of what you need. So that being the case, you know the old adage, 'the best way to make the gods laugh is telling them your plans.' So grief it seems to me is a kind of skillfulness, not a coping strategy. So you can feel all manner of things in the presence of ‘your grief’ - for example, joy is utterly compatible with this understanding of what it means to grieve. Because when you grieve, some aspect of that action is affirming life. In its most heart-rending appearances, grief still affirms life & the ways of the world. A formulation that came to me years ago that I’m very fond of & proud of goes something like this: I wondered to myself one day, ‘What is the lived relationship between grief and love? Because oftentimes, people, particularly in the throws of real heartbreak, will understand these things to be absolute & polar opposites, and hostile to each other. And in fact, you craft love so as not to have to grieve. And by the time grief rolls in, it’s because it’s devastated your capacity to love. So these things are implacable adversaries. I don’t think so at all. I think that one is the midwife to the other in fact. So it could go something like this. Love, you could say, has a relationship to grief that’s unsuspected & unsought. And it might be this, if grief is a way of loving those who have slipped from view. And I think anybody listening to this would say, ‘Well certainly that’s in the mix.’ Grief is a way of loving. It’s an expression of love in a fashion. You wouldn’t grieve over something that you didn’t have a deep-running attachment to in some fashion as it slips away. So grief is a way of loving. Yes. That which has slipped away. Got it. You’re going to turn this on it’s head aren’t you? Yes. And I’m going to submit to you, ‘Love is a way of grieving that which has not yet slipped from view.’ But love is whispering to you, and grief is whispering to you, ‘That that’s a time-limited arrangement.’ Did you realize that, be you a Buddhist or not a Buddhist, something about grief is teaching you about the impermanence of things. Even grief itself is impermanent. And that impermanence tempers your understanding of love – that love’s not eternal, that the object of your love is not eternal either, and that you’re doing all you can to get your love in order NOW, not only for the heavy weather, but for the end of the weather, for the end of the time that you’re alotted to be able to do it. So imagine then, that love is an active form of grieving, that doesn’t require sadness or misery, but it stops you from time to time. And if you have children in the world, I mean anybody who does, knows what I’m going to say next. That you look at them occasionally, and if you can bear the thought, one of the things you realize is, you dragged them into this world to die. That’s what you did to them. You didn’t mean to. You didn’t even think of it at the time. You may not even have thought of deliberately making a child, in the moment that you did. But all of that’s besides the point. And that kid’s over there, making a fool of themselves as an idiot teenager, whatever they’re doing, right? And some part of you is awash in a kind of bottomless sorrow - that’s not sad. It’s somehow deeper than sadness. It’s the most adult version of sad – the realization that you’ve put in motion things that will deliver genuine heartbreak to people that you claim to love. And that’s what you did. And it’s a package deal. And some part of you wants to take them aside and just apologize. And of course they’ll look at you and say, ‘What?’ They have no idea what you’re talking about – right? And you realize that you’re in this alone, for the time being. They’re not old enough to know how sorrowful you’ve become over what you’ve done to them. It’s an amazing stew of impossible-to-resolve things. And if this stuff has its way with you as you age into your days, your capacity to stand & deliver, informed by this kind of understanding, is really one of the most politically, socially & psychically dangerous powers that a human being can have - the understanding that it won’t last. Don’t get me wrong – it can go dark. Of course it can. You can decide that nothing means anything. That your attachment to people and social institutions & so on, is irrelevant & meaningless, because it’s all going to burn away like chaff. You can do that. But there’s no grief in that. There’s resentment & hostility & grief is gone. But if grief informs your understanding of the impermanence of life, it deepens your attachment to life. It doesn’t increase it. It doesn’t mean you hold onto it tighter. It means you deepen your capacity to love knowing how, like dust it is. You know Leonard Cohen, my countryman, has a line for everything. He’s got a line for this too. In one of his songs he says,
'Oh my love, be not afraid, we are so lightly here, it is in love that we are made, in love we disappear.'
You can’t improve on that. It’s all there. ‘Be not afraid’ – that’s the recipe. Not, ‘hold on tighter.’ He was in a Zen monastery in California, and he took his vows & the whole thing. And as he told the story, after he came down from the mountain, his teacher looked at him one day really hard & long – perhaps like a parent looks at a child, the way I described earlier – and he said to him, ‘older you get, lonelier life becomes, greater love you need.’ That was his recipe. If you listen carefully, he didn’t say, ‘lonelier life becomes, greater love you need to get for yourself so you’re not so lonely.’ He didn’t say that. Because this isn’t the solution to loneliness. This is a radical act that comes from an understanding of loneliness. ‘Deeper love you need’ to be, or to do, or to deliver to the world – not to get for yourself. That’s dangerous. In a culture that believes in taking care of yourself & protecting & so on, the notion that your appetite for being able to make love deepens as you realize its impermanence & its limits. That makes you an elder in training. It’s very dangerous to the status quo and my favorite kind of trouble.” Stephen Jenkinson (part 1 of 7) "Elderhood in a Time of Trouble" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSIlixSuMYQ
We're so used to being stuck in the rut, the echo-chamber of our petty self-concerns. But if we're fortunate, we'll get the opportunity to be able to fully, deeply experience pain of sufficient severity & duration, that we'll know with absolute certainty that this pain is far too great to be one person's, that surely we must be experiencing the collective pain of the entire human race. If at that point we willingly endure & process it for the benefit of all, the crazy intense suffering unexpectedly MIGHT transmute into bliss - little me opens to a mystery that's infinitely greater - the small individual screaming for relief & love becomes, temporarily, the Source of relief & love for all. This is a mysterious alchemical shift between realities - personal to transpersonal / universal? matter to energy? Newtonian to Quantum? physical to spiritual? human to divine? created to co-creator? - all of these?
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us." Marianne Williamson "Of course, not all people grow from crisis. Some refuse to accept the need for redefinition, and orchestrate their own intellectual and emotional shutdown. Those who do grow manage to stay awake to the anguish, confusion, and self-doubt. This requires a high tolerance for discomfort, as well as the ability to see the world as it is, not as they wish it to be. Over time, the people who continue to struggle emerge wiser, kinder and more resilient. After they have broken & rebuilt themselves, they feel less breakable. Living is a complicated process, a journey of discovery that never ceases. As I grow older, the basic facts of life seem increasingly simple. The closer we live to our core, the more we realize that we are like other people. My fear and sorrow are yours, as is my harsh self-judgment. My desire to be good and to feel loved is your desire, too. We all seek peace." Mary Pipher. "Seeking Peace. Chronicles of the Worst Buddhist in the World." Riverhead Books, 2009.
“Mindful awareness is fundamentally a way of being – a way of
inhabiting one’s body, one’s mind, one’s moment-by-moment experience. It
is a natural human capacity. It is a deep awareness; a knowing and
experiencing of life as it arises and passes away each moment. Mindful
awareness is a way of relating to all experience – positive, negative, & neutral – in an open, receptive way. This awareness
involves freedom from grasping and from wanting anything to be
different. It simply knows and accepts what is here, now. Mindfulness is
about seeing clearly without one’s conditioned patterns of perceiving
clouding awareness, and without trying to frame things in a particular
way. It is important to learn to see in this way because how a
person perceives & frames the moment generates their reality.” Shauna
Shapiro PhD
“A number of years ago, at a retreat in Ithaca, New York, Leonard told me that he was going to retire from music. Then a few years later, he came out of retirement, and he came out with a CD that he called Ten New Songs … The whole album is dedicated to, 'Our Teacher, Joshu Sasaki Roshi.' The works of Leonard Cohen, are known all over the world, of course. But what isn't known is that they are peppered with inside allusions to the teachings of Sasaki Roshi. The fifth cut on the Ten New Songs is called "Love Itself" and it's Leonard's version of the teisho, or Zen talk, of Sasaki Roshi. Unless somebody pointed it out, you wouldn't realize that. Sasaki Roshi has only one talk: There is zero. But zero is inherently unstable because it consists of all of the positive and negative in the universe. Therefore, inevitably it breaks apart into expansion and contraction. Expansion only knows how to expand. Contraction only knows how to contract. In between, they create a vibration called space, and that vibration is further nurtured and matured in the cleft between them, and then it evolves into a feeling thinking self that either knows it just came from zero, in which case we call it an enlightened self, or it doesn't. If it knows where it just came from, it knows to give the positive that it received from father back to father, and the negative that it received from mother back to the mother. Therefore, it disappears. There's nothing in between father and mother anymore. And they come back together to create a new state of zero. Oh, you don't understand? Okay, well, I'll try to say a little more. Then he says exactly the same thing again. And then, I see you still don't understand. Well, let me see if I can say some more. But you see, each time he says it, he lives it. He could say it forever. He lives that cycle and if you sense that he's living that cycle, you could listen, you could hear him say it forever. You're going to see in this song, there's a refrain. It imitates the style of Sasaki Roshi, but there's more to it. Sasaki Roshi talks about this little room of space where father and mother vibrate, and that's — They come into contrast, you reunite, come into contrast, reunite. He always describes it as like a private little room where there's only the two sides of the Source. Many of you have experienced that there are different flavors of Flow, different flavors of impermanence. I look upon the expansion and contraction as the fundamental flavors. When a wave comes up on the shore, the top of the wave is expanding, the bottom of the wave is contracting, and in the cleft as they're sheared apart is born all this foam. There's wavy Flow, there's vibratory Flow, which is analogous to the foam, but underlying it all is this expansion and contraction. Often, the most prominent experience of Flow, or change, or impermanence, is a kind of scintillating misty bubbly kind of Flow and it's very blissful, often. And your whole body and mind and the external world can dissolve into it, and it's like trillions of little motes of dust sort of just shimmering. Some of you have had that experience. Because it's blissful, there is the danger of being attached to it. But if you don't become attached to that, then it all sort of flatlines into zero. All the little vibrations go back to the Source. Father and mother come together, and there is shalom bimromav, the peace of heaven. If having that champagne bubbly experience of Flow is like being made love to, in a sense, what's beyond that is the Gone. And what's beyond the Gone? Well, after Gone, there's no place to go but to come back, to self and world, but to see it in a different way, for having had that experience. And to do this over and over and over again until there is no fundamental separation between the experience of the Source and ordinary experience. They're on a continuum. There's not a duality between the deepest transcendent empty timeless spaceless cessation, there's not a duality between that and any ordinary experience. They're on a continuum. That's living nirvana. There's nothing in between one's humanity and that which is beyond the human. And that would pretty much describe the world of a master. There is the formless, there is the form, and then there is them not being fundamentally separate. In the end, if you want to experience what Sasaki Roshi calls true love, hontō no ai, use that expression. It says everybody wants true love, but they don't realize that true love is zero. True love is what happens if you're willing to let go of the most celestial form of love other than true love, so you'd have to even let go of the massage of the spirit. Understanding this, you are in a position to completely understand Leonard's song called 'Love Itself.'" Shinzen Younghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSv5ELuujjs&list=PLngmRO3nU7wLESfjzlpE3STD4YqFvq5pE&index=32&t=4s
“Long ago, back in Maine, I worked for a small marine publishing company, where I had the pleasure of editing A Cruising Guide to the Maine Coast by a man named Hank Taft. When I met him, Hank was one of those exuberant, restless souls, sixty-one going on thirty, filled with life and passion. A member of the distinguished Taft clan that has contributed to American history a president and a pioneering educator, he bounced around in a variety of careers, from business executive to president of Outward Bound. He’d rowed the entire Maine coast in a twelve-foot Peapod and was now making a fine debut as an author and a cruising sailor. ‘Stunned’ was the response of virtually everyone who knew him when we learned that Hank had contracted pancreatic cancer. And Hank himself was no less stunned, but he quickly regrouped. Characteristically, his first response was to give it the ‘old Yale try,’ taking command of his treatment program with the same panache as if planning a transatlantic cruise. The pieces involved an eclectic blend of physical workouts, diet, light chemotherapy, and – new to a staunch rationalist like Hank – visualization meditation for an hour each morning. I remember the day very clearly: February 4, 1991. The sun was just rising over the islands of Penobscot Bay, and Hank’s wife, Jan, had cooked us a hearty lumberjack’s breakfast. As we sat overlooking the cold, brilliant ocean partly obscured in winter sea smoke, conversation came around to the topic of Hank’s plans for the upcoming sailing season. Somehow we got from there onto the subject of fog, and we all shared our uneasiness about making passages in zero-visibility conditions. ‘But there’s a lot of ways to keep busy so you don’t feel your fear,’ Hank observed cheerfully. ‘You can keep precise time checks and enter them in the log. You can stand out on the bow and every minute do a 360-degree scan of the waters. You can watch for changes in ripple patterns and identify passing lobster buoys …’ ‘Yes, I said – and then, volunteering some of my own work-in-progress on the subject of fog passages, ‘or else you can just let the fear come up and fall through it to the other side….’ He looked at me as if I’d just pierced him with a sword. How I wished those words had never been spoken! Over the next few weeks Hank became decidedly more inward. He quickly gave up the visualization and the lumberjack breakfasts, then the workouts and chemotherapy. He gathered his family, made his final reconciliations, settled his affairs, and waited. It did not prove to be a long wait. Within three weeks the rapidly spreading cancer had obstructed his lower intestine, and he faced the choice of eking out a few more weeks of life in a hospital or dying at home. Wholeheartedly he chose the latter. Hank had never been a religious man (in fact, he held religion primarily responsible for the bigotry and violence in the world), but in those final weeks a change so extraordinary came over him that none of us could fail to notice it. As his physical body withered, his soul grew large and luminous. Friends gathered by his bedside could feel the energy of love radiating from him almost as a force field. He faced his death with open heart, utterly trusting and utterly serene. Three days before the end, I went for what was to be my last visit. Hank was curled in bed, his body totally broken yet somehow radiantly powerful. We hugged each other and said farewell. And then his last words to me – so muffled and unexpected that I did not at first catch them: ‘Are you fearless yet?’ ‘Not yet, Hank,’ I said. ‘I’m trying.’ ‘Fall … fearless … into … love.’ In those final mumbled words, Hank conveyed more to me of the essence of who he was and what life was than could have been done in a lifetime of spiritual teaching. … From a force greater than our own lives, we are made for this, and when we finally yield ourselves into it, we are born into a meaning that is never known as we struggle on the surface with our acorn reality.”
Even if we sort of like Hank's final advice to Cynthia, without the 'help' of impending death, most of us cannot deeply understand it, because we live in "acorn reality" - our society's shallow, hyper-rational mental prison. Cynthia's story about "acorn reality":
“Once upon a time, in a not-so-faraway land, there was a kingdom of acorns, nestled at the foot of a grand old oak tree. Since the citizens of this kingdom were modern, fully Westernized acorns, they went about their business with purposeful energy; and since they were midlife, baby-boomer acorns, they engaged in a lot of self-help courses. There were seminars called ‘Getting All You Can out of Your Shell.’ There were woundedness and recovery groups for acorns who had been bruised in their original fall from the tree. There were spas for oiling and polishing those shells and various acornopathic therapies to enhance longevity and well-being. One day in the midst of this kingdom there suddenly appeared a knotty little stranger, apparently dropped ‘out of the blue’ by a passing bird. He was capless and dirty, making an immediate negative impression on his fellow acorns. And crouched beneath the oak tree, he stammered out a wild tale. Pointing upward at the tree, he said, ‘We … are … that!’ Delusional thinking, obviously, the other acorns concluded, but one of them continued to engage him in conversation: ‘So tell us, how would we become that tree?’ ‘Well,’ said he, pointing downward, ‘it has something to do with going into the ground … and cracking open the shell.’ ‘Insane,’ they responded. ‘Totally morbid! Why, then we wouldn’t be acorns anymore.’ ”
Most of us are so armoured-up against life due to all sorts of traumas, that we're 'hard nuts to crack'. And yet ...
"There is a crack in everything That's how the light gets in ..." Leonard Cohen
“Most important of all, do everything you can to nurture your spiritual intelligence. It is your only genuine source of hope, direction, meaning, and comfort.” Thomas Moore
Cynthia Bourgeault. “The Wisdom Way of Knowing: Reclaiming An Ancient Tradition to Awaken the Heart.” Jossey-Bass, 2003.HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
I had the title Poet and maybe I was one for a while Also the title Singer was kindly accorded me even though I could barely carry a tune For many years I was known as a Monk I shaved my head and wore robes and got up very early I hated everyone but I acted generously and no one found me out My reputation as a Ladies' Man was a joke It caused me to laugh bitterly through the ten thousand nights I spent alone From a third-storey window above the Parc du Portugal I've watched the snow come down all day As usual there's no one here There never is Mercifully the inner conversation is cancelled by the white noise of winter "I am neither the mind, The intellect, nor the silent voice within..." is also cancelled and now Gentle Reader in what name in whose name do you come to idle with me in these luxurious and dwindling realms of Aimless Privacy?
